One of my favourite skits from The Mitchell And Webb Look, currently showing on BBC Two on Thursdays, 9:30pm (GMT) is the Nazi Officer skit (view it here). They also have a MySpace site here. Well worth watching, utterly hilarious!.
Mitchell And Webb Skit ›
September 29th, 2006Anna-Marie, Aids, And South Africa ›
September 28th, 2006Like many whites in South Africa, we had a maid from the moment we moved into our new house near Pinetown, Durban in around 1989 or so. Roughly 8% of South Africa’s workforce are thought to be domestic workers, the vast majority of whom are now earning R1000 or less per month (2003 figures). As late as 1999, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) estimated that the average wage for domestic workers was between R369 and R549. The large domestic labour force reflects both South Africa’s apartheid past and its current struggle with job creation, poverty and unemployment, where “Between 1994 and 2003, unemployment rose by 153 percent [and] is still 115 percent higher than it was in 1994.”
My Mind Is Open For Viewing ›
September 28th, 2006A new addition to the site: lowfatbrains’ mind, which is basically my own little store that I set up on Amazon using their new aStore feature available for their associates. If you go and have a look, it opens a new window (it seems their iframe code doesn’t fit in nicely with my site; it’s still in beta, so maybe that’ll change in future) and you’ll get a list of my featured books. At the moment they only allow nine books to be displayed, with no ability to add books to categories or sub-categories, so I’ll try and change the featured page on a fairly regular basis.
Photo: Mopani Moonrise ›
September 27th, 2006
The Soviet Afghan War ›
September 27th, 2006Some recovered history here, one of my favourite pieces: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It’s nothing “new” if you follow these things, but it’s worth writing down. Anyway, the “official” doctrine for many years had it that the USSR invaded long before the CIA began funding their opponents that later went on to become the Taliban. In fact, the CIA’s own website still refers to the invasion as being an “intelligence failure”: “Earlier intelligence reports on activities by the Soviet military units had not been accompanied by warnings that this activity might indicate Moscow’s intent to launch a major military intervention.”
Greg Grandin on Latin America ›
September 27th, 2006Alternet has an interesting interview with historian Greg Grandin discussing his new book, Empire’s Workshop, and “how ‘militant anti-Communists’ in the Reagan administration developed the model for the Bush doctrine.” (There is an excerpt from the book also available here on Alternet). As he explains, the book tries to “look at how U.S. corporate elites — the Guggenheims, the Rockefellers and so forth — first established themselves in Latin America with their overseas subsidiaries and how U.S. political elites viewed the region as the first place to project American power.”